Emergent Research

EMERGENT RESEARCH is focused on better understanding the small business sector of the US and global economy.

Authors

The authors are Steve King and Carolyn Ockels. Steve and Carolyn are partners at Emergent Research and Senior Fellows at the Society for New Communications Research. Carolyn is leading the coworking study and Steve is a member of the project team.

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Emergent Research works with corporate, government and non-profit clients. When we reference organizations that have provided us funding in the last year we will note it.
If we mention a product or service that we received for free or other considerations, we will note it.

The Cities With the Most Self-Employed

New York, not surprisingly, has the largest total number of non-employer businesses.

Non-employer statistics are often used as a proxy for self-employment.

This is because a "non-employer businesses" is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as "one that has no paid employees, has annual business receipts of $1,000 or more ($1 or more in the construction industries), and is subject to federal income taxes."

In other words, non-employers only have an owner. The data comes from IRS tax files and includes full and part-time businesses. About about three-quarters of all U.S. businesses are non-employers.

For a variety of reasons too wonky to go into here, the non-employer stats are an imperfect self-employment proxy (see the U.S. Census non-employer methodology description for more detail). But we consider this data to be a directionally correct measure of self-employment, both in terms of growth and overall size.

You may ask how non-employer data differs from BLS self-employment data.

The quick answer is the non-employer data comes from IRS data, while self-employment data comes from the BLS's monthly current population survey. This means the two data sets aren't really comparable. See this article for more details.

We started tracking the non-employer data back in 2006. It was the dataset that first alerted us to the growth of the gig economy.